


Corporate Espionage

by Merkwerkee



Category: Void Jumpers
Genre: On the Run, The Company - Freeform, misuse of scientific research, where your retirement plan is a bullet in the back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:21:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27373363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Baxter reflects back on his tenure at The Company while two Company fighters try and shoot him and his trusty robot companion C-NACK88 out of the sky
Kudos: 1





	Corporate Espionage

He really, _really_ should have seen this coming.

Professor Baxter Brautigan suppressed a wince as the robotic pilot C-NACK88 threw them into a hard turn, narrowly avoiding the spray of Void bolts one of the pursuing ships had just fired at them. The turn had been hard enough that the gyrostabilizers had lagged and jarred his bad knee against the bulkhead, and even through the brace it was letting him know in no uncertain terms that it did not appreciate the treatment. Fortunately, their pursuers hadn’t expected the move and overshot, allowing C-NACK88 to finally begin an approach to the Void relay they’d been intending to use the entire time.

Baxter leaned back and rubbed his sore knee. He wasn’t the best at reading people; even on a planet with fifteen trillion inhabitants, he’d been able to count his friends on one hand as a kid and he’d just never picked up the knack. When he’d been offered a position at the Company, he’d thought it was a dream come true - a chance to travel to other planets and continue the experiments that lit up his brain like fireworks. He should’ve known better; sure, that’s what it had been in the beginning - but then he’d caught a lab assistant copying files. He’d reprimanded them and sent a report off to the Company, and had never seen that assistant again.

He’d played it a little closer to the chest after that, keeping his files encrypted. Encoding his notebooks. It was still a grand adventure of science that made his heart race with excitement, of course, but some of the shine had worn off. Then, too, there had been the Company’s insistence that he try live subjects - he’d tried to keep those experiments to a minimum, but he’d had to know if the first one was a fluke or not. His process worked perfectly every time, and the Company had been very impressed - impressed enough to give him a special assignment.

And that was really the kicker, wasn’t it. He’d been told to retrieve critical research from the Bloom planet; what he hadn’t been told was that it was _his_ research. Baxter wasn’t an arrogant man, he just knew with a stone-cold certainty that his research was the only such research to have successfully crystallized magic. He’d heard tell of some rituals that could do it too, but he’d dismissed those stories as the unfounded rumors that they clearly were. So the only natural conclusion to finding an enormous Bloom aeryx on the Bloom planet was that someone was using his research without his knowledge or consent.

Baxter was careful with his creations, and the aeryxes he made. He’d made sure to keep them for defensive or utilitarian uses as much as possible, no matter how much the Company had pushed him to make weapons. In addition, he was very careful about the sources he used to make them; aside from the living subjects, he tried to take only from things that occurred naturally or in abundance. He’d sunk years, _decades_ of his life into this research, and he rubbed his hand over the heavy metal gauntlet that represented the culmination of those decades as the thought weighed on him. He had done his damndest to make sure that his research and experiments were conducted responsibly and ethically as much as was possible.

Whoever had taken his research to Bloom had had no such compunctions.

The gauntlet creaked as Baxter involuntarily clenched his fist at the memories, and he absently made a note to check the integrity of the joints and oil them later. The death of Summoner Langorium had only been the tip of the iceberg; he hadn’t known the man - or any other Summoner, before that trip - personally, but he’d seemed well-liked in the town by his people. Choking to death on his own blood in the middle of a laboratory seemed like an ignominious way to go, an insult to the work he’d done for his people. More even than that, the Company would want to reclaim as much as possible from the laboratory - the pleasant little meadow that Langorium had released into the world with his death would like be trampled underfoot if it wasn’t meticulously collected for analyzing in some other cold lab later.

The real sore spot there had been the missing workers. Even the memory of _that_ room made Baxter gag slightly; he’d certainly never forget the way the corpses had been carelessly butchered to make room inside of them for the scorpion’s spawn. He’d heard, vaguely, of some species of insects that laid their eggs in corpses so their young could take full advantage of an abundant food supply - life sciences hadn’t really been his thing, except where they intersected with magic - but he’d never really considered what that _meant_. Especially when said insects were the size of small shuttles and equipped with toxic stingers. The thing had hunted down, killed, and slaughtered hundreds of people - in a facility where the Company had apparently trapped and caged it to bring about an enormous Bloom aeryx.

Baxter may not have been the best at figuring out other people, but even he could connect those dots. His research, his technology, his contributions to the Company - his fault.

So he’d cut his ties to the Company in more ways than one, and run for it. He’d gotten away from Haven clean, with most of his equipment and the samples he’d managed to acquire of that strange black stuff that had infested the insect life on Bloom, but he’d made a mistake not too long ago that had lead to the most recent predicament of two Company ships on their ass and gunning for them.

In his defense, he hadn’t had much of a plan when he’d fled Haven. It mostly involved not being incarcerated on a tiny moon and forced to go through the motions of lab work for the rest of his life, however long that actually ended up being. He’d managed to take out the Problem Solvers in his way and grab C-NACK before the robot had been decommissioned for parts, but once they were out of the system his well of ideas had run somewhat dry. By sheer force of habit, he’d grabbed his tablet and pulled up his email and calendar; unfortunately, it was his work email and work calendar, which had given away his position immediately.

It had paid unexpected dividends, though; in addition to the expected 56 mB message from his father and 47 increasingly hysterical messages from his mother, there’d also been one from the cousin he hadn’t heard from in years. It had contained nothing but a picture of some kind of grassland at night, with the caption “Your eyes are open and you are not alone.” He’d only begun to decipher what it could possibly mean when the Company ships had started shooting; he’d ended up downloading the thing to a quarantine tablet and jettisoning the tablet he _had_ been using out the waste disposal airlock; C-NACK had managed to connect to the Void relay to prep it for a random jump, and now all they had to do was get there.

Warnings blared as they approached the relay; _missile lock._ Baxter cursed under his breath and leaned forward to tinker with the console. If he could just coax a little bit more speed out of the countdown to jump, he could -

With a sound like a million angry bees, the Void relay activated and both Baxter and C-NACK were suddenly someplace far, far away.


End file.
